Hong Kong embraces RISC-V open-source chip design to secure spot in China semiconductors
Hong Kong is betting on the RISC-V open-source chip architecture to drive innovation and secure a position in China's semiconductor landscape amid escalating US chip restrictions.
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The city, which is planning to host the
International Young Scientist Forum on Artificial Intelligence , is promoting research in
AI and open-source technology, particularly RISC-V, Finance Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po said in his 2025 budget address on Wednesday.
RISC-V stands for the fifth generation of the Reduced Instruction Set Computer, a design philosophy for simplified architectures for central processing units (CPUs). As an open-source project, it is free for anyone to use and modify, unlike competing standards such as Intel's x86, a complex instruction set that dominates personal computers, and Arm's eponymous proprietary RISC-inspired architecture, which dominates the smartphone market.
First developed in 2010 by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, RISC-V is now managed by RISC-V International, a Zurich-based non-profit organisation.
Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po delivers the Budget 2025-26 speech in the Legco chamber on February 26. Photo: Elson Li
While not nearly as widely used as x86 or Arm, RISC-V has been rapidly gaining traction because of its open-source code base. This has been especially true in mainland China, where the government and businesses hope it can reduce reliance on foreign proprietary technology amid an intense tech war with the US.
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Last month, a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a top government research organisation, announced that it would deliver its RISC-V-based XiangShan CPU this year. The team said earlier this month it had adapted XiangShan to support DeepSeek-R1, the popular open-source reasoning large language model developed by Hangzhou-based AI start-up DeepSeek.
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